Perez Hilton: What's the Attraction

He's ranked #2 in Forbes.com's "Web Celeb 25," there's an article on his rise to fame in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly and it's hard to believe, but PerezHilton.com attracts over 2 million page views a day.

Why?

Seriously... why?

Thanks to his incessant kowtowing of wanna-be b-list celebs, Perez, (whose real name is Mario Lavanderia) has managed to land a few bit parts in a handful of TV shows. I recently watched an episode of "the Janice Dickenson Modeling Agency" that had the plasticized Janice absolutely swooning over the fact that "THE Perez Hilton" was on hand to help ogle a bunch of beefcake models auditioning for her agency.

I'm sorry, I just don't understand the attraction with this guy.

I mean, the majority of his work involves stealing copyrighted paparazzi photos and drawing on them like he was a 5 year old, then throwing a couple of bitchy sentences together about whatever is on his mind at the moment. Although I noticed that he tends to not report anything his fag hag Paris Hilton is up to. Is there some kind of self-imposed simpatico that these two share just because her name is in his blog's title?

Regardless, Mario's actions have gotten him into quite a bit of hot water around litigious Los Angeles.

Last November, X17 sued him for $13 million and in February, Universal Pictures filed suit against him for posting unauthorized images of a topless Jeniffer Aniston from the film "The Break Up."

The latest in a long line of people that want a piece of Perez's bulbous, copyright-infringing ass has been 'razzi photog Ken Knight, who is suing Perez for $300,000 in damages arising from Lavanderia stealing Knight's photo of Jason Alexander (Britney's first husband for around 15 minutes) and posting it to his blog without permission. (BTW, the offending photo is still online.) The Smoking Gun has all the details and copies of the legal docs, if you are interested.

According to the EW article, "Bryan Freedman, Hilton's attorney, insists that since PerezHilton.com contains satirical content, the real issue is the First Amendment. "This is about a bigger ideology - and that's why he hasn't given in to these lawsuits... If you stop people from using pictures for the purpose of satire and commentary, you're chilling free speech."

Word.